Day of Earth

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One of the questions thoughtful and mission-based publishers ask is why books on environmentalism don’t sell.  Since it’s Earth Day (by the way, Happy Earth Day!), I thought I’d ponder it here.  My own amateur sense, as a personal eco-warrior, is that younger people are very focused on fixing environmental issues.  In fact, it is often THE issue for them.  And honestly, reading books about our many, many failures to sustain our environment is downright depressing.  I’ve read several, and seldom do I put the book down without a profound sense of grief and hopelessness.  Many of us do what we can while watching others thoughtlessly carrying on as if our modern lifestyle is normal.  I don’t advocate getting out of the matrix and hunting mammoths with spears, but I do wonder how to get through to those who don’t think about it.

I’ve been on the “Green Committee” at work for many years.  I sense the hopelessness there as well.  Our business has gone about as green as it can but unless you can convince other, less concerned industries to reduce their footprints too, we’re all still walking through the new carboniferous age.  Little things matter.  Some of us may not be able to afford an electric car, but hybrids are somewhat reasonably priced (in as far as car prices are ever reasonable).  LED lightbulbs have dropped from over $10 a pop to two for a buck.  And why are we still using natural gas when electricity can be produced by wind?  My young next-door neighbor has been encouraging us to get solar panels.  We would, but we have to get the garage roof fixed first.  And so it goes.

Caring for the environment is a big job.  These days, however, we also have to keep an eye on politicians who get elected to serve only themselves.  And Supreme Court justices who do things that would get many of us fired for bribery.  Here’s the thing: justice doesn’t work unless it applies to everyone.  We share this planet.  It’s difficult to build forward momentum to save our home when corruption is so deeply entrenched among those who control budgets and who have so many unthinking followers.  Even so, we as individuals can do what we’re able.  We may not be able to afford to repair that garage roof yet to get solar panels installed—it really is in a prime location with uninterrupted southern exposure—but we can compost.  And be conscious of our energy use.  And even, if we’re brave enough, read some books on how to help make things better.  The earth, it seems, is something worth saving.

Image credit: NASA

Human Humanities

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The New Yorker, if it didn’t take so much time to read, would be on my magazine list.  I’m primarily a book man, and there’s so little time these days that magazines seem mere ephemera.  However, someone at work pointed me to a story on the end of the English major that was really about the end of the humanities.  It was most disturbing.  Making the case that college students really prefer the humanities, they nevertheless go to STEM because that, and business, are the only place to find jobs.  In a world where work increasingly demands more hours a day, these young people take employment that kills their souls in order to keep their bodies alive.  The “starving artist” is no joke.  Society has deemed humanity unimportant.

The Rebuke of Adam and Eve, by Charles-Joseph Natoire, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, via Wikimedia Commons

What happens when we cease to be human?  Artificial intelligence and robots and capitalism.  It’s a cold world where only numbers matter.  I’m not a great one for metrics and “evidence-based” humanities.  No, Romanticism is not dead.  The world where imagination reigns and Adam Smith is not even a shiny shekel in his great-grandfather’s blue eye.  How do I know it was blue?  Imagination.  You see, I’ve written a few novels (unsuccessfully), and I know a few (very few) colleagues who do as well.  Mainly I know that because their novels find publishing houses that know how to get them in the public eye.  I jealously guard those friendships because I’m a Romantic.  I tilt the electronic windmills telling me all of life is statistics and figures.  No, those slowly spinning blades are liable to chop your head off, if you let them.

My friends often express surprise when I reveal that I’m a Romantic.  Books should be evidence enough.  Ideally, work would allow us to bring our gifts to the table—or more accurately, screen.  It would find a way of saying, “be human here because we really mean what we say about diversity and inclusion.”  Instead, evaluations are metrics-based.  The numbers.  The bottom line.  At moments such as these, I throw off my hat and let my thoughts run free.  I daydream about the books I’ve read and those I’ve written.  I imagine life as a place to truly be human.  The humanities are all about understanding what it means to be authentically human.  And let me tell you something—it’s not all about numbers.  In fact, if I had it all to do over again, I think I would be an English major.  With no regrets.

Miracles

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“Expect a miracle,” Oral Roberts used to say, “and a miracle is yours today.”  The famed Evangelical probably didn’t have Catholic-variety miracles in mind, although a story on the Catholic News Agency does.  Miracles come in big and small varieties.  In case you’re feeling encrusted in materialism, there are plenty of things science hasn’t yet explained.  It helps to have a little wonder in your quotidian routine.  So what was this miracle?  It took place in Hartford, Connecticut.  Specifically, at St. Thomas in Thomaston.  In case you’re not Catholic, or high church Episcopalian, a brief explanation: after the consecration of the host (communion bread), ordained clergy pass communion wafers to those who come forward to receive them.  Believing in transubstantiation, this is done with a great deal of attention to detail.

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

The vessel that holds communion wafers is called a ciborium.  (My years at Nashotah House were good training for this.)   Since consecrated wafers should never be defiled, only a certain amount are consecrated at a time—enough to cover those present for the Eucharist, usually.  Any extras are locked in a tabernacle for future use.  In this miracle, a minister handing out the wafers noticed he was running out.  Believe me, this is something to which clergy pay close attention.  Then suddenly there were more wafers in the ciborium.  A multiplication of loaves, but in much smaller and pre-ordered form.  One child called them, I once heard, “tiny little quesadillas.”  Perhaps a small miracle, but we take what we can get.

A miracle is defined as “an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency.”  Since we can’t observe all phenomena all the time, they do occur now and again.  What happened in Connecticut?  I don’t know.  No scientist was observing, and no vestment cams were in use.  We have the word of a clergyman with no cause to lie.  Maybe something unusual did happen.  Yet I can hear the evangelicals protesting that if God were to perform a miracle it would have something to do with Donald Trump rather than some popish fetish.  That’s the problem once religions get involved around miracles.  Too much is left to interpretation.  Sometimes I think of the miracle of the sun at Fatima, Portugal.  Or of people miraculously healed from late-stage fatal diseases without medical intervention.  These things happen and when people are pressed for an explanation they tend to turn to the divine.  Perhaps, however, things just aren’t what they appear to be.

Another Exorcist

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I learned from the wonderful Theofantastique that Russell Crowe’s new movie is The Pope’s Exorcist.  (I guess Crowe hadn’t read Nightmares with the Bible to think to send me a personal notice.)  I knew instantly, from the title, that it had to be about Fr. Gabriel Amorth.  Say what you will about him, he inspired William Friedkin to make a documentary titled The Devil and Father Amorth.  It’s pretty unnerving to watch, no matter what is really going on.  Catholic officials aren’t trilled about Crowe’s movie—I wasn’t impressed with his portrayal of Noah in Darren Aronofsky’s take on the flood story a few years back.  It takes a certain kind of director (like Friedkin) to be able to handle theologically dense material in a believable way.  I can’t say anything about Julius Avery’s The Pope’s Exorcist, of course, without having seen it.

I can say, however, that those who publish books at $100 miss many opportunities.  My book is one of very few written by a credentialed religious studies scholar on demons in movies.  A quick web search will reveal that it remains basically unknown and uncited.  (The only Amazon review is a two-star job by an evangelical who didn’t like what I was doing.)  Pay $100 for a book with a two-star review?  Most people, reasonably, have better things to do.  I once got around this in the past by posting a PDF of one of my book for free on Academia.edu, where, at recent count, it has been viewed over 6,000 times.  Academic publishers don’t realize the appeal of most of the books they publish.  Even demons can’t open a wallet to a Franklin level.

So while I’m waiting for enough royalties to afford seeing The Pope’s Exorcist, I’ll focus on my current book project.  Of course it’s on something completely different.  The Wicker Man should be coming out in September, but my mind will likely be elsewhere.  Those of restless intellect are condemned to wander, it seems.  Of course, I have Theofantastique to keep me busy.  There are other kindred spirits out there.  They don’t know the way to my website, I suspect, but I’m not alone in being excited about a new exorcist movie.  I’m not expecting anything to surpass The Exorcist, however.  Like The Wicker Man, The Exorcist turns fifty this year.  One guess which was the more popular film.  Given Crowe’s profile I’m surprised there hasn’t been more buzz about his new film.  Demons can be funny that way.

Actual Intelligence (AI)

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“Creepy” is the word often used, even by the New York Times, regarding conversations with AI.  Artificial Intelligence gets much of its data from the internet and I like to think, that in my own small way, I contribute to its creepiness.  But, realistically, I know that people in general are inclined toward dark thoughts.  I don’t trust AI—actual intelligence comes from biological experience that includes emotions—which we don’t understand and therefore can’t emulate for mere circuitry—as well as rational thought.  AI engineers somehow think that some Spock-like approach to intelligence will lead to purely rational results.  In actual fact, nothing is purely rational since reason is a product of human minds and it’s influenced by—you guessed it—emotions.

There’s a kind of arrogance associated with human beings thinking they understand intelligence.  We can’t adequately define consciousness, and the jury’s still out on the “supernatural.”  AI is therefore, the result of cutting out a major swath of what it means to be a thinking human being, and then claiming it thinks just like us.  The results?  Disturbing.  Dark.  Creepy.  Those are the impressions of people who’ve had these conversations.  Logically, what makes something “dark”?  Absence of light, of course.  Disturbing?  That’s an emotion-laden word, isn’t it?  Creepy certainly is.  Those of us who wander around these concepts are perhaps better equipped to converse with that alien being we call AI.  And if it’s given a robot body we know that it’s time to get the heck out of Dodge.

I’m always amused when I see recommendations for me from various websites where I’ve shopped.  They have no idea why I’ve purchased various things and I know they watch me like a hawk.  And why do I buy the things I do, when I do?  I can’t always tell you that myself.  Maybe I’m feeling chilly and that pair of fingerless gloves I’ve been thinking about for months suddenly seems like a good idea.  Maybe because I’ve just paid off my credit card.  Maybe because it’s been cloudy too long.  Each of these stimuli bear emotional elements that weigh heavily on decision making.  How do you teach a computer to get a hunch?  What does AI intuit?  Does it dream of electronic sheep, and if so can it write a provocative book by that title?  Millions of years of biological evolution led to our very human, often very flawed brains.  They may not always be rational, but they can truly be a thing of beauty.  And they’re unable to be replicated.

Photo by Pierre Acobas on Unsplash

Wicker Man Comes

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Not that I would know bodily, but it seems like a book being published is something like giving birth.  It takes several months (perhaps years, in the case of books) from conception to delivery and there are certain milestones along the way.  And you worry like Rosemary.  Has something gone wrong?  Is this still going to happen?  The book production process is a long and complicated one.  Just this week, however, the next recognizable stage occurred for The Wicker Man.  An ISBN has been assigned and a new book announcement has fed out through various channels.  It’s not on Amazon just yet but a Google search of 9781837643882 will bring it up.  I’d been worried about this because I saw a new book announced on The Wicker Man due out in October.  This is the fiftieth anniversary of the film, and I suspected I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed that.

Ironically, another film turns 50 this year.  The Exorcist released in December of 1973 to far greater acclaim than The Wicker Man.  Both films became classics in their own right, but The Exorcist would become a household name.  Even if they’d never seen it, most people had heard of it.  The Wicker Man is more of a cult classic.  It’s known among horror fans and a certain kind of Anglophile.  And those interested in paganism, particularly of the Celtic variety.  Although the cover isn’t available yet, I was glad to see the feed for my book going out.  It looks like I might scoop the other book by a month or so.  If that happens it will be the first time that I’ve actually had a book on horror release before Halloween.  The last two missed the deadline by a couple of months.

Having said that, if you’ve had your appointment with The Wicker Man you already know, it takes place on May Day.  And you likely know that a large number of people claim it isn’t a horror film at all.  Indeed, the horror element only becomes clear in the last ten minutes or so.  It’s the build-up that makes the movie.  And it was really a one-film wonder for the director, Robin Hardy.  He did other movies, but this was the one that lasted, and spawned imitations and parodies.  It’s exciting to see that the discriminating, or very persistent, searcher can now find the book announcement online.  I haven’t seen much to-do about the 50th anniversary just yet, but now when I do I’ll have something to point to.  More on this to come!

Human Capital, Are You?

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Human capital.  Is there any more demeaning phrase?  Those in positions of political authority like to use the term.  To grow the economy, to people the military, to ensure the GDR Almighty surpasses each and every idol, we have to ensure the correct placement of our human cattle.  Oh, I mean capital.  I was recently reading about our rivalry with China.  The expert I was consulting noted that it all comes down to human capital.  With populations shrinking, this is annoying to those who want to measure nation against nation, back to back.  In China, it’s said, your fate is determined at a fairly young age.  And that made me wonder about late bloomers.  Like yours truly.  To see me up through at least fourth grade nobody would’ve supposed I was Ph.D. material.  (Considering how this all worked out, maybe they were right.)

Humans, if we’re honest, mature at different rates.  Some of us take decades to learn what we’re good at.  This may be a problem endemic to the poor—kids who are raised by parents that are uneducated and don’t even know about things like after-school classes and clubs to enhance the experience of growing up.  Or if they do know about them, can’t afford them.  They raise their children to be blue collar in mentality.  Of course, capitalism relies on this.  You need human capital to collect garbage and dig ditches.  To people the military.  I often wonder how many of these folks might’ve been (and still could be) hidden geniuses.  You see, when I grew up working as a janitor in my middle school, during the summers, I listened to the hourly employees as they talked.  It wasn’t all about women and alcohol.  No, some of them were untrained philosophers.  I learned that I wasn’t the only human capital that thought deep thoughts while running a floor stripper.

The very concept of human capital ensures that some potentially world-changing kids will be overlooked and slotted where “society needs them.”  If we would educate ourselves more our world could become a more equitable and pleasant place for the 99 percent.  Instead, we keep the capitalist machine fed, nations comparing one another’s capabilities.  China may use balloons creatively, but we can be assured that all developed nations are surveilling their neighbors, assessing how they’re using their human capital.  All I know is that I grew up destined to work as a janitor, but the thoughts in my head wouldn’t stop.  And one mentor, who worked for a church, decided to show me the way.  How I wish I could help others escape, but there’s some comfort in being part of a machine.

Which bit are you?

Handle with Care

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It reminds me of that old Traveling Wilburys’ song, “Handle with Care.”  Hate is a strange and dangerous motivator.  It’s something that makes me consider demons as a real possibility.  Having experienced Zoom bombing during an online meeting about racism, I was greatly saddened.  The distress the bombers caused in just a few minutes was truly saddening.  With white supremacist comments and ideology, they seemed to have nothing better to do than to ruin the day of twenty-some people who want to make the world a better place for all.  I was reminded of a video that Arnold Schwarzenegger had posted earlier that same week.  The link is below and it is worth twelve minutes of your life.  I’ve been impressed by how Schwarzenegger has been using his influence to combat the evils of Trumpism, although himself a Republican.  Of course, he has a backbone that many elected officials lack.

As an Austrian, Schwarzenegger is aware of the damaged lives that Nazism left behind.  There’s no glamour here, just pain left behind for all.  We’ve unfortunately suffered through four years of leadership based on the rhetoric of hatred that has rubber-stamped this kind of thinking.  It will take many years to recover, if we ever do.  And the internet, for all the good it does, also offers a venue for those who find hateful activities enjoyable.  I do wish there were a way to channel such people to Schwartzenegger’s video.  It is the moral responsibility of the strong to protect the weak.  We have millennia of history to back that up.  What’s so hard about live and let live?

Opposites don’t always hold fast, but love certainly is the antithesis of hate.  One of the things watching horror movies has done for me is to reinforce what happens when hatred is allowed to take control.  The best of the genre contains morality that reinforces that those who love overcome while those who hate never end up in a happy place.  No belief system that promotes superiority is worth investing in.  There will always be those with nothing better to do than to trawl the internet to troll those who try to make the world a better place.  As a society we can reject such behavior and attempt to help those who are motivated by hatred.  The damage caused by hate is real.  Actual human beings are destroyed by it, and for no reason.  Many of us, most, I suspect, think love is the ultimate good.  We must do what we can to try to help those who disagree, no matter what certain political leaders espouse.  The Wilburys were right, all people deserve to be handled with care.

I P.M. therefore I A.M.

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While I seldom have occasion to count beyond ten, I sometimes think the 24-hour clock would be a better option.  Since we have to face another major time malfunction (AKA switch to Daylight Saving Time) this coming weekend, I’m thinking about time.  That, and I recently had someone ask me to set up a noon Zoom meeting.  A nooner Zoomer is fine with me, but each time I have to ask is it “a.m.” or “p.m.”?  Parsimonious websites rather snarkily (but correctly) say that it’s neither.  It’s that liminal changeover between ante-meridian and post-meridian.  It, along with midnight, stands outside the a.m. and p.m. system.  Thankfully I don’t have many meetings at midnight, but still, a 24-hour clock, such as military folk like to use, makes sense.  A meeting at 12:00 would always be noon, and 24:00 would always be midnight.

I tend to wake up around 3:00 a.m.  I admit that it’s convenient to mark 3:00 p.m. as the 12-hour awake point in my day.  I could easily adjust to do the same at 15:00.  In fact, my watch—yes, I still use one—has the 24-hour timescale in smaller print just inside the more legible 12-hour one.  I’m sure that we can all count to 24.  Wouldn’t it make sense, in the service of ending confusion about a.m./p.m.?  (Not to mention having to type in all those periods!)  The way we divide time is arbitrary.  The reason that we settled on twelve actually hearkens back to the official title of this blog, namely the ancient world.  The ancient Mesopotamians had a base-6 counting system, unlike our base-10.  When time came to be divided into hours, it was done on a base-6 system, giving us 12 hours of light and 12 hours of night.

Such ancient ideas as these are very difficult to change.  We can’t even seem to agree that if Daylight Saving Time is such a good idea, why don’t we keep it all year round?  I suspect most of us adjust to gradual change more easily than that sudden loss of an hour of sleep.  Even the added hour in the fall doesn’t make up for it.  If we can’t change something that’s obviously that flawed, how can we hope to agree that having 13 to 24 added to our clocks would be better?  Or maybe just round things down to 20, for our base-10 system?  Yes, hours would be longer but maybe we could negotiate fewer of them for work.  But I’m just dreaming here.  And it’s not even p.m. yet.

Just Justice

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I don’t mean to be insensitive, but there’s so many injustices to address.   We need better vocabulary for the victims of patriarchy.  And patriarchy tends to be “white” in color.  February is Black History Month and March is Women’s History Month.  These are important reminders, but I have trouble focusing on an entire month, let alone a day—particularly if it’s a work day.  That doesn’t mean I don’t support my fellow human beings.  So today’s International Women’s Day.  I frequently wonder why it’s so hard for a particular type of man to see and treat women as equals.  I’m afraid that it often comes down to might making right, which we all know is wrong.  While power may not be inherently corrupting, many people are weak and are too susceptible to its blandishments.  And power likes nothing better than similar people and sycophants.  Women remind us that we can do better.

We don’t see those women elected to high political office grasping for the power to be queen for life (except queens, but that’s a different story).  Instead we find a spirit of cooperation instead of this constant atmosphere of competition that seems so testosterone-driven that it ought to be X-rated.  I don’t stereotype women as docile, but female leaders aren’t known for starting wars.  And none of us would be here if it weren’t for women.  The spirit of the times is one of wide representation—the principle of hearing all voices instead of only those of the powerful and ultra-wealthy.  I’m not sure why men feel so threatened by women that they try to deny them a place at the table.  Or pay them less for the same work.

Perhaps we fear societal change, but change finds us no matter what.  We now know that sex, gender, and race don’t make any person inferior.  Indeed, the struggle to be dominant often creates these categories in order to assert oneself over others.  As any mother of multiple siblings knows, teaching children cooperation leads to much better results than setting kids off against each other.  It’s a lesson that politics has yet to learn.  Culturally, it seems, this is well accepted.  People deserve to be treated equally.  That concept is called “justice” and our entire legal system is based on it.  Why don’t our politics match our culture?  I don’t want to stereotype, but it seems to me that far too many men are involved.  It’s International Women’s Day.  Let’s take the opportunity to rethink how half the human race is treated.

Pentagrams

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Not to dwell on Satanism, but the morning after my last post on the topic, while out on my morning jog, I came across a pentagram incised in the pea gravel of the bike path.  Then another.  Lest there was any lingering doubt that this had to do with the local school’s Satan club, a few feet further along a 666 appeared.  None of this was there the day before and, given that folks my age are too busy to be out scraping sigels in the sand, I suspect that it might’ve been someone younger.   Dare I say, school-aged.  Protesting or promoting I couldn’t tell.  As I jogged, I fell to thinking about pentagrams.  They’re not inherently evil and actually have an interesting history.  For most of that history it was morally neutral, if not a positive sign.

In the 1800s, during Romanticism’s heyday, it was supposed that an inverted pentagram—one with two points up instead of one at the top—was a sign of evil.  It was also in the 1800s that the contemporary king of outrage, Aleister Crowley, began what would eventually morph into modern Wicca.  Crowley liked to refer to himself as “the wickedest man on earth,” at least among his friends.  The upside-down pentagram was seen to represent a goat’s head, and if you’ve read my book you’ll know that some groups have long associated goats with demons.  Ironically, during the Nixon Administration the Grand Old Party began to use inverted pentagrams on their elephant logo.  Evangelicals who otherwise object to this “Satanic” symbol seem quite okay with it branding their political party.  Truth in advertising, I guess.

The thing about symbols is that they only have the power we give them.  The five points of a star symbol match well the pentagonal symmetry that we often see in nature: sea stars, sand dollars, strawberry flowers, and eucalyptus seed pods.  It’s pleasing to the eye for creatures with five fingers and five toes.  There’s a rightness about it, even if it doesn’t look a thing like the stars in the sky.  Is it Satanic?  No, only to those who believe it to be so.  Are there Satanists trying to take over public schools?  No.  That doesn’t mean people don’t think they aren’t.  (That last sentence is all tied up in nots, I guess.)  Symbols, by their nature, contain the meaning we assign to them.  They say to me that kids pay attention to what adults do,  so if we act grown-up perhaps—just perhaps—they will aspire to do the same.

Satanic Struggle

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Around these parts folks are in an uproar about an after-school Satan Club.  The idea is an action to get Evangelical undies in a bunch, and it’s only proposed when a school system supports an overtly Christian club.  Reaction more than action, really.  Right now Nextdoor.com is bursting at the seams with indignation about something most people don’t understand.  I can’t claim to be an expert, but I’ve read plenty of books about Satan and many of them deal with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan.  The Church of Satan believes in no literal Devil or Hell.  It was established to draw attention but also to make a statement when Christian Nationalists start to get too pushy.  Still, people are afraid of Satanism as the numerous international panics about it have shown.  And conspiracy theories don’t help.

It seems to me that the solution to all of this is education.  People, naturally enough, react to things emotionally.  I do it all the time.  (This is one reason that Artificial Intelligence will never be truly that—humans think with their emotions as well as with reason.)  The sad thing is, there are many easy ways to correct mistaken assumptions.  The information is out there and it’s easily found.  It’s easier, however, to spout off on social media like you’re an expert on something you know nothing about.  Trump introduced a culture of outrage—did his supporters suppose nobody else was capable of doing the same?  The Church of Satan was established as such an outrage.  In a nation of literalists, they hit a nerve.

The Church of Satan does not worship the Devil.  It supports social causes and it cooperates with law enforcement when some unbalanced individuals think it means something that it doesn’t.  To my way of thinking, this creative endeavor, despite getting the attention it sought, might’ve been better thought through.  Although extremism appeals to those who, like Herostratus, crave fame at any cost, does it really move us any closer to where we want to be?  Part of the problem is that many outspoken political figures want us all to be the same as them.  White, Christian, male, heterosexual.  I really can’t imagine a worse kind of nightmare.  Humans crave variety and new ideas.  As I sit here watching a new, uninformed Satanic Panic developing in my own backyard, I wonder if we all wouldn’t do our blood pressure a favor by sitting down with a book.  And maybe learning what this really is about.  Shoving matches seldom end well.

Valentines and Bombs

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So what was I thinking, posting about bombs on Valentine’s Day?  Regular readers know my fascination with holidays.  Valentine’s Day is another one of those that simply gets plowed under by the sharp shares of capitalism.  We work on Valentine’s Day, of course, after waking to news of yet another multiple shooting at a university.  Is it any wonder that we think about bombs on Valentine’s Day?  As Tina asks, what’s love got to do with it?  In 2016 we were taught that the politics of hate is how elections are won.  Surveys consistently show Americans favor stricter gun laws but congressmen love money more.  Maybe love does have something to do with it after all, Ms. Turner.

Love, it seems to me, was the best thing Christianity had going for it.  While the Gospels aren’t entirely consistent on this point, the figure we call John (not the Baptist) focuses on it.  Jesus spoke of, indeed, insisted on love.  “God is love” some radical went so far as to write.  But love gets in the way of selfish agendas.  We can wave Bibles around, and hold them up for photo ops, but they do no good that way.  Besides, love might, in some instances lead to sex.  And we know that Augustine won that argument centuries ago.  We don’t have a widely recognized holiday celebrating that dour saint, however.  Perhaps we should take a cue from the fact that nobody knows which Valentine yesterday really commemorates.  Isn’t love best when it can even be anonymous?

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

I often ponder why it seems so difficult for people to love universally.  Yes, we do annoy each other.  Yes, we have conflicting agendas.  If, however, we pause for a moment and consider we’ll see that other people have feelings just like us.  They too want to be loved and appreciated, and held by those closest to them.  This is not a bad thing.  What’s so wrong with love, after all?  We pour money into the military industrial complex and try to regulate who can love whom.  And we say we’re living the religion touted by the New Testament.  I always try to keep Valentine’s Day special.  It can be tricky on a Tuesday when work will bear its inevitable load of problems to solve.  Still, if we all paused when we faced a people-related frustration on Valentine’s Day, and said to ourselves (saying it aloud would only cause problems) “I love you” to the person causing our frustration, I wouldn’t have been thinking of bombs on Valentine’s Day.

How To Build a Bomb

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We see footage of the tragedy in Ukraine.  Or the miles and miles of film documenting World War II with its hell from the skies bombings.  Bomb after bomb after bomb.  I recently wrote of how tragic this is in the light of the Turkey-Syria earthquake.  Just a few days before that, the New York Times ran an interest piece on how bombs are made.  Now, there’s no excusing it, but boys seem to like explosions.  Although I’m a pacifist, I was fascinated by how long the process is and how specialized the work, to make a bomb (technically a shell, but the result’s the same).  And then we see the footage and realize all this time, money, and technology are going into objects to be shot at other human beings.  Rise and kill.

It is an indictment of our species that we spend so terribly much on destroying others of our own kind.  Some of this is evolution, surely, but some of it is consciousness gone awry.  Nobody wants to be the victim of somebody else’s bombs.  At the same time, there are different political philosophies in the world and our history has made us distrust, and maybe even hate, one another.  I think of Putin and his hatred of the west.  And then I think how close we are.  From mainland to mainland, Russia and Alaska are only 55 miles apart.  If you include the islands, that figure drops to 3 or 4 miles.  And an entire ideological world.  This is such a strange fiction we’ve created.  

Some experts tell us that our systems of allowing strong men to rise to the top (and note, female belligerent national leaders are quite rare) will inevitably lead to war.  Of the making of bombs there is no end.  These guys in the news story require bomb making to take home paychecks to support their families.  Even now there are war zones throughout the world where it’s not safe to wander because of ordinance.  Some of them are even here in the United States.  On a visit to a friend in West Virginia we went to Dolly Sods Wilderness area.  It’s rugged and wild and beautiful.  Once used as an area for military training, unexploded ordinance still exists there.  Visitors are warned of this, of course.  But there are other mined and fought-over areas where the innocent are still killed long after the war has ended.  As an adult boy I’ve become less impressed with explosions.  If you live long enough, ideally, you should begin to understand life is a gift, and not something to be thrown away.  Or taken by someone else’s bombs.

Natural Disasters

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Like many, my heart goes out to those in Turkey and Syria suffering through the destruction and aftermath of a major earthquake.  Such natural disasters often bring out the best in people—empathy, love, and offers of support.  They lead to both tragedy and human warmth.  They also give us pause to reflect, if we will, on our worst behaviors.  Rescue efforts have been hampered, in Syria especially, by a weakened infrastructure, caused, at least in part, by foreign bombing.  And yes, the United States was part of that.  People who now feel our sympathy only months before faced death from us.  What is it about our species that makes us want to destroy one another through our own technology but then turns and wants to help when a “random” act of nature occurs?  We must prefer death on our own terms.

Image credit: Luca Comerio (1878-1940), Corpses of victims of the earthquake in Messina, via Wikimedia Commons

For me, part of this is reflected in how the so-called “culture of life” treats liberal social causes as the “culture of death.”  Those groups that support “the culture of life” are against abortion but desire no controls on gun ownership.  This is the same basic principle—we want to cause death on our own terms.  We want to play God and decide who is worth saving and who should be destroyed.  I have no doubt that if, say, a tornado destroyed an entire city block outside a convention center where the NRA was meeting that those at the conference would rush out to try to help find survivors.  When they reconvened, they would try to figure out how to protect their “right” to own and collect assault rifles.  Is this “culture of life” really worth preserving?

Meanwhile the people of Syria and Turkey are suffering.  Thousands are dead, winter is setting in, and Covid is still out there.  They need our help.  The amount we spend on aid will, however, pale next to the amount we spend on bombs, drones, and missiles.  I have to wonder if we never really stop to think about what we’re doing when we engage in behaviors that destroy others.  That weeping mother outside an earthquake-collapsed building could be the same mother outside a missile-collapsed structure.  With natural disasters we know that we all stand a chance of being victims.  We feel for those caught in the way.  Once politics enters the picture, however, and we have the ability to control who lives or dies, everything changes.